Fashionable Philosophy eBook

are, that they separate their votaries from the practical
duties of life, and create a class of idle visionaries
who, wrapping themselves in their own vain conceits,
would stand by and allow their fellow-creatures to
starve to death, because, as Mr Sinnett frankly tells
us, ’if spiritual existence, vivid subjective
consciousness, really does go on for periods greater
than the periods of intellectual physical existence,
in the ratio, as we have seen in discussing the devachanic
condition, of 80 to 1 at least, then surely man’s
subjective existence is more important than his physical
existence and intellect in error, when all its efforts
are bent on the amelioration of the physical existence.’

“This is the ingenious theory which the Brothers
of Thibet have devised to release them from acknowledging
that they have any other Brothers in this world to
whom they are under sacred obligations besides themselves,
and which, owing to the selfish principle that underlies
it, has a tendency to sap the foundations of all morality.
So that we have this nineteenth-century apostle of
Esoteric Buddhism venturing to assert to his Western
readers that ’it is not so rough a question as
that—­whether man be wicked or virtuous—­which
must really, at the final critical turning-point,
decide whether he shall continue to live and develop
into higher phases of existence, or cease to live
altogether.’ We, the Sisters of Thibet,
repudiate and denounce in the strongest terms any such
doctrine as the logical outcome either of the moral
precepts of Buddha or of the highest esoteric science.
Let the Brothers of Thibet beware of any longer cherishing
the delusion that the Sisters of Thibet, because their
existence is purely objective, ’are therefore
unreal and merely transitory delusions of sense.’
We also have a secret to reveal—­the result
of twenty centuries of occult learning—­and
we formally announce to you, the so-called adepts
of occult science, that if you persist in disseminating
any more of your deleterious metaphysical compounds
in this world under the name of Esoteric Buddhism,
we will not only no longer refrain, as we have hitherto
done, from tormenting you in your subjective conditions
while still in your rupas, but, by virtue of
the occult powers we possess, will poison the elements
of devachan until subjective existence becomes
intolerable there for your fifth and sixth principles,—­your
manas and your buddhis,—­and
nirvana itself will be converted into hell.”